Although anyone who bothers to swing by would have already guessed as much.

I haven’t lost interest in any of the topics I may have blogged about in the past.  I just can’t seem to find the time to post regularly here any more.  I’ll still be hanging around the blogosphere though – no doubt I’ll turn up in the comments sections here and there.  But it seems memeplex is going to be on the back burner for a while.

See ya ’round like a rissole.

Cop that all you ignorant racist yokels!*

It was nice to see Obama get over the line the other day.  I can be a negative nelly when it comes to politics and I always suspect the worst outcome because of some last minute balls-up by my preferred candidate/party.  So on this occasion, as with Howard’s demise, I was rather chuffed.

Others were not.

At The Oz, Janet Albrechtsen was rather disappointed with the demolition of the McCain/Pailin duo, but she also saw a silver lining.  After the US electorate failed to heed her warning that, if elected, Obama would appoint ‘unelected’ judges to the Supreme Court, she took solace in the fact that several states voted to ban same-sex marriage.

In California, where Obama secured 61percent of the vote, 51per cent of voters supported a ban on gay marriage. Obama’s political sophistry ñ declaring his belief that marriage is between one man and one woman but declaring his opposition to banning same-sex marriage ñ was rejected by the people of California… Elsewhere, voters also banned same-sex marriage last week. In Florida where Obama won 51per cent of the vote, 62 per cent of voters said no to same-sex marriage. In Arizona, – a Republican hold, 56 per cent of voters said the same. In all, more than 40 states have laws or constitutional bans against same-sex marriage.

Sure, maybe lefty elitists control the Whitehouse, Congress, the Judiciary, the media and the schools and universities, but at least the state isn’t recognising the lifelong commitments of gay couples.  It’s not all bad.

Janet takes comfort in “the voice of Americans across the nation who voted against a range of orthodox left-liberal positions”.  Gay marriage was voted down in California, Arizona and Florida, while Arkansas passed a referendum stopping gay couples from adopting children.  But Janet conspicuously avoided mentioning the fact that marijuana for medical use was supported in Michigan, along with the legalisation of stem cell research.  Also, Washington State joined Oregon in legalising physician-assisted suicide.  ‘Orthodox left-liberal positions’ lost out in some sates, but not in others.

But Janet misses the point, as she has done on numerous occasions in the past when she decides to put pen to paper on these issues.  The fact that majorities in these states voted against gay marriage does not mean prohibiting homosexuals from being married is right.  For Janet, the gut-feeling of the electorate is the best judge on moral issues.  But what will Janet do when the gut-feeling of the electorate changes?  What if 51% of Californians voted against Proposition 8 instead of for it?  Would she smile politely and say “Very well then”?  No.  Californians would no longer be wise morally grounded conservatives.  They’d be a state of lefty liberal elites, out of touch with the rest of America’s moral masses.  That pundits like Albrechtsen rely so heavily on argument ad populum only serves to illustrate how vacuous the case against gay marriage really is.

Meanwhile, Bill Muehlenberg highlights part of Obama’s victory speech as a sign of Western civilizations impending doom:

And his anti-marriage and anti-family views are also a major concern. Just how long before he introduces a whole raft of legislation seeking to grant special rights to homosexuals, including the right to marry? Answer: we have a very good clue in what he told his adoring fans last night. Incredibly, in his acceptance speech it only took about two minutes before he mentioned the issue of homosexuality. I think that must be a world first – certainly an American first.

What got Bill all riled up?

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

Gasp!  He acknowledges the existence of gay people.  We’re clearly fucked.  But surely sanity will prevail in the comments…

Hmm.

* Obviously, there were plenty of people who didn’t vote against Obama for reasons other than race.  This statement is not directed at them.  To them I would merely say “Cop that!”.

At the American Spectator we find an article by Richard Weikart titled thusly:

Darwin and the Nazis

Uh – oh. It’s almost as if Weikart is about to try and blame Hitler and the Holocaust on Darwin and evolutionary biology. This type of rhetoric is currently the centrepiece of the Intelligent Design Creationist (IDC) modus operandi. As I’ve remarked on numerous occasions, continued failure to provide real evidence for their religiously motivated theories has forced IDC’s to resort to this mud throwing tactic. They can’t win on the science, so they try to get attention by mentioning Darwin and Hitler in the same sentence as frequently as possible. But wait, maybe I’m jumping the gun here. Perhaps Weikart has some new and convincing arguments which make a water-tight case for the connection between evolutionary biology and the Final Solution. Let’s see what he has offer…

Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and some other Darwinists are horrified that the forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, will promote Intelligent Design to a large audience when it opens at over a thousand theaters nationwide on April 18. Ironically, their campaign to discredit Ben Stein and the film confirms its main point, which is to expose the persecution meted out by Darwinists to those daring to criticize Darwinian theory.

Not off to a good start. Weikart reveals that he is unable to draw a distinction between criticism and persecution. If someone disagrees with you and says so, that’s not persecution. If you make sloppy, fallacy ridden arguments and someone calls you out on it, that’s not persecution. By Weikart’s definition of persecution, this very blog post is an act of persecution. If IDC’s want to be taken seriously a good start would be to drop the whole cry-and-run-home-to-mummy routine every time someone says or writes a few unkind words about them.

[W]hat is most objectionable about the Nazis’ worldview? Isn’t it that they had no respect for human life? Their rejection of the sanctity of human life led the Nazi regime to murder millions of Jews, hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, and about 200,000 disabled Germans. Where did the Nazis get the idea that some human beings were “lives unworthy of life”?

As I show in meticulous detail in my book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, the Nazis’ devaluing of human life derived from Darwinian ideology (this does not mean that all Nazi ideology came from Darwinism). There were six features of Darwinian theory that have contributed to the devaluing of human life (then and now):

1. Darwin argued that humans were not qualitatively different from animals. The leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, attacked the “anthropocentric” view that humans are unique and special.

Technically, humans aren’t any different from animals. Homo-sapiens is a type of animal. To acknowledge that humans are a part of the animal kingdom is not to suggest that humans have less value. Science does not rule on the value of things.

2. Darwin denied that humans had an immaterial soul. He and other Darwinists believed that all aspects of the human psyche, including reason, morality, aesthetics, and even religion, originated through completely natural processes.

Darwin had every right to disbelieve in the existence of immaterial souls. Why? Because he saw no evidence to support there existence. Perhaps Weikart may feel better if he believes in immaterial souls, but that doesn’t mean they are real. Furthermore, he doesn’t explain why not believing in immaterial souls is a bad thing. Presumably he believes it to be self-evident. Weikart also fails to explain why natural origins for reasoning and morals is problematic. Why do these things need magical origins to have meaning?

3. Darwin and other Darwinists recognized that if morality was the product of mindless evolution, then there is no objective, fixed morality and thus no objective human rights. Darwin stated in his Autobiography that one “can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.”

So it seems Weikart believes there exists an objective, fixed morality. But can he tell us what this morality is? Can he tell us why this morality is superior and why we can rely on it? No. I, for one, do not share Weikart’s theological presuppositions; if he wants to convince me a given action is moral (or immoral) he needs to employ logic and reason. He can’t appeal to a holy book or religious dogma to which I do not subscribe.
Also, it takes a lot of lateral thinking to interpret Darwin’s quote as “do whatever the hell you like”.

4. Since evolution requires variation, Darwin and other early Darwinists believed in human inequality. Haeckel emphasized inequality to such as extent that he even classified human races as twelve distinct species and claimed that the lowest humans were closer to primates than to the highest humans.

And of course the idea that some races were inferior to others existed long before Darwin. In the 1800’s it wasn’t unusual for Europeans to consider themselves as superior to others, and no doubt many of these Europeans were devoutly religious people who would have rejected Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

5. Darwin and most Darwinists believe that humans are locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence. Darwin claimed in The Descent of Man that because of this struggle, “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

In the grand scheme of things (especially if we look at things on a geological timescale), humans are locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence. And unsurprisingly, Darwin’s quote is taken out of context. Refer to the TalkOrigins quote mine project for more details.

6. Darwinism overturned the Judeo-Christian view of death as an enemy, construing it instead as a beneficial engine of progress. Darwin remarked in The Origin of Species, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”

Would all subscribers of the Judeo-Christian worldview agree that death is an “enemy”? Remember, when you die, you don’t really die, and if you’ve been a good boy or girl you reap a wonderful reward. And again, Weikart sees no need to explain why Darwin’s interpretation of the workings of nature is wrong. For him it just ‘sounds bad’, and that’s enough.

These six ideas were promoted by many prominent Darwinian biologists and Darwinian-inspired social thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All six were enthusiastically embraced by Hitler and many other leading Nazis. Hitler thought that killing “inferior” humans would bring about evolutionary progress. Most historians who specialize in the Nazi era recognize the Darwinian underpinnings of many aspects of Hitler’s ideology.

Again, Weikart pretends genocide and the notion of racial superiority didn’t exist prior the the publication of The Origin of Species. Even if Hitler had explicitly cited Darwin’s insights into biology in justifying his programs of mass extermination it would not change the fact that species evolve. And are these historians the same historians cited by David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views? The historians that don’t really sign-on to the Darwin-to-Hitler meme?

But what does this have to do with the present? Darwinists today are not Nazis.

If you look back at the six points outlined above, however, you will find that many Darwinists today are advancing the same or similar ideas. Many leading Darwinists today teach that morality is nothing but a natural product of evolution, thus undermining human rights.

Non-sequitur. If human morality has natural explanations why does it logically follow that human rights are undermined?

E. O. Wilson, one of the most prominent Darwinian biologists in the world, and Michael Ruse, a leading philosopher of science (the latter is in Expelled) famously stated that ethics is “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes.”

Many leading Darwinists today also claim that Darwinism undermines the Judeo-Christian conception of the sanctity of human life. Dawkins wrote in 2001 that we should try to genetically engineer an evolutionary ancestor to the human species to demolish the “speciesist” illusion that humans are special or sacred. In the same article he expressed support for involuntary euthanasia. Another critic of “speciesism,” Peter Singer, one of the leading bioethicists in the world, argues that Darwinism destroyed the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic, so infanticide and euthanasia are permissible. James Watson, one of the world’s most famous geneticists and a staunch Darwinist, has railed at the idea that humans are sacred and special.

Given Weikart’s track record so far on presenting the thoughts and words of others, I think it’s fair to take all of this with a grain of salt. If Dawkins had really suggested that we should be running around euthanising people at any chance we get I think I would have heard about it by now. Furthermore, whether or not humans are ’special’ depends on the context of the discussion. I suspect in the above cases Weikart has omitted this context.

This is yet another poor attempt to smear evolutionary biology by the IDC’s. Non-sequitur after non-sequitur is offered in place of any real arguments. It’s getting boring – the crap churned out in favour of this absurd notion is as monotonous as it is illogical.

Catch the Fire reports:

Sixty one key Charismatic/Pentecostal leaders in the American Church gathered recently to seek the face of God for 2008.

Did they check their toast?

From The Australian:

LIBERAL leader Brendan Nelson yesterday admitted he had lied in a speech to a public rally as a senior official of the Australian Medical Association.

In his first major interview since becoming leader nine days ago, Dr Nelson apologised for the lie he described as “wrong, stupid and bad”.

“We all make mistakes,” he told The Weekend Australian.

“I’ve made mistakes. That was a significant one. I can’t do any more other than to apologise to the people who are offended by it.”

Four days before the 1993 federal election, Dr Nelson, as AMA vice-president, told the rally in Melbourne: “I have never voted Liberal in my life.”

At one point yesterday, he said he was unable to explain why he made the comment, but later claimed he felt intimidated because “a couple of bus loads of union thugs” had arrived to demonstrate against then prime minister Paul Keating.

So not only do unions eat the babies of business owners, they scare you into lying too.  Bastards.

Australia’s terrorism laws have found there way into the news again:

A SENIOR counter-terrorism officer with the Australian Federal Police has testified that police were directed to charge “as many suspects as possible” with terrorism offences in order to test the new anti-terrorism laws introduced in 2003.

The admission was made by federal agent Kemuel Lam Paktsun, the senior case officer on the Operation Newport investigation that led to the arrest of Sydney medical student Izhar Ul-Haque, whose trial was sensationally dismissed in the NSW Supreme Court yesterday.

Because that’s an efficient and effective way to do law enforcement – just arrest everyone.

I can hear the response of the right wing commentariate now:

“Yeah, but these judges, civil libertarians and bleeding hearts don’t understand that we’re fighting a war against terrizm!”